Classical

Dante Quartet

Even in this anniversary year, Vaughan Williams' chamber music seems unlikely to get much exposure, but his Second String Quartet was included in the Dante Quartet's Cheltenham recital, alongside works by Frank Bridge and Elgar and a world premiere. The Vaughan Williams was composed during the second world war, and audibly belongs to the same musical world as the Fifth Symphony and part of the opera Pilgrim's Progress.

It is a subdued, introspective work, intended as a present to a viola player. Each of the four movements begins with a solo for that instrument, which defines the music's autumnal mood. But the Dante's quietly intense performance - especially of the second-movement Romance, with its echoes of a Tudor string fantasia, and the lingering Epilogue, salvaged from an unused score for a film about Joan of Arc - made it hauntingly memorable. Their accounts of Bridge's Three Idylls and Elgar's Piano Quintet (with pianist Noam Greenberg) were equally highly charged, though the textures in this most overtly Brahmsian of all Elgar's mature works sometimes seemed oversaturated in the close Pump Room acoustic.

The novelty was My Day in Hell by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, who won a Royal Philharmonic Society composition prize last year and this commission for the Dante Quartet was the result. Based on her first reading of the Divine Comedy, it is a 10-minute, single-movement piece, apparently structured according to the numerology of Dante's descriptions of hell and purgatory, but coming across as an almost nostalgic essay in writing expressive melody. The music is highly wrought, yet piled high with emotional content, and in a curious way it is very English-sounding too, not out of place alongside the rest of the programme.